The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue
CBC Books | | Posted: January 9, 2025 2:57 PM | Last Updated: 8 hours ago
A historical fiction novel exploring the Spanish Flu pandemic
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.
In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.
In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds. (From HarperCollins Canada)
The Pull of the Stars was longlisted for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award. It is now on the longlist for Canada Reads 2025. The final five books and the panellists who chose them will be revealed on Jan. 23, 2025.
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Emma Donoghue is an Irish Canadian writer. Her books include the novels Learned by Heart, Landing, Room, Frog Music, The Wonder and the children's book The Lotterys Plus One. Room was an international bestseller and was adapted into a critically acclaimed film starring Brie Larson. It won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes.
From the book
The mortuary was deserted. I'd been down to its white chill before, but I'd never seen it so eerily full of coffins. Six high against all four walls, like firewood stacked ready for the furnace. I wondered how the attendants remembered who was who–did they pencil the names on the sides?
So many!
Doctor Lynn murmured, This is nothing. Out at the cemetery there are hundreds of caskets piled up, waiting their turn. Hazardous to the living, I call it. The Germans – an eminently practical race – cremate their dead.
Really?
A shocking notion, but fas est ab hoste doceri, you know.
My face was blank, so she glossed that: Learn even from enemies. It wouldn't surprise me if this flu turned out to be caused by a miasma of rot blowing over from the battlefields…
From The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue ©2020. Published by HarperCollins Canada
How Emma Donoghue wrote The Pull of the Stars
"I don't even know who wrote it, because The Economist doesn't give article bylines, but some journalist wrote evocatively about the 1918 flu, something I never knew existed.
"I knew it happened and it killed two per cent of the world, but I never got into knowing the details.
"I was fascinated by the atmosphere of a very urban, very modern kind of plague. It seemed so post-apocalyptic.
"I thought it would be interesting to write a novel which, instead of coming across as a typical sort of historical novel, it would have a dystopian atmosphere of an urban civilization fraying at the edges.
I was fascinated by the atmosphere of a very urban, very modern kind of plague. It seemed so post-apocalyptic. - Emma Donoghue
"There's a moment in the first chapter where somebody opens a newspaper and the pages inside are blank. That was due to a lack of gas supply at the printing works.
"It's a bizarre and eerie detail but you notice they still publish the newspaper. There's an element of life that goes on — but with strange missing bits."
Read the full interview here.